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June 8, 2014

What Comes After "It's Okay to Kill Americans and jail them indefinitely without counsel."?

By Rob Kall

President Obama has made it clear that it is okay to kill Americans without a judge or jury and congress passed a law, NDAA, which allows people to be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely without legal representation. This is the tip of a spear. It has opened a wound in the constitutional protections of Americans that will deepen, become infected and will continue to expand its manifestation in other nations.

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NDAA and Guantanamo Protest
NDAA and Guantanamo Protest
(Image by World Can't Wait)   Details   DMCA

President Obama has made it clear that it is okay to kill Americans without a judge or jury and congress passed a law, NDAA, which allows people to be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely without legal representation.

This is the tip of a spear. It has opened a wound in the constitutional protections of Americans that will deepen, become infected and will continue to expand its manifestation through local police and in other nations.

We don't know; Killing
We don't know how many Americans have been killed based on Obama's orders. We don't know if Obama has delegated the authority to kill independently to other people or organizations. Are there people in the CIA who are now authorized to kill? Are there private organizations, like the company that used to be called Blackwater, which have been authorized to kill?

We don't know: Disappeared
The Obama administration and it's Eric Holder led Justice Department fought to keep the NDAA mightily. Some have speculated that they fought that hard because they've already been engaging in the actions the NDAA permits. The people in congress who supported the parts of the NDAA which authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens, on American soil, claimed, according to Wikipedia, that "Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) already grants presidential authority for indefinite detention."

Who knows how many people are already rotting in secret prisons?

If the president and USA does it...
The thing is, when the USA does something, it sets the precedent for other nations to do the same thing, and worse. Same thing goes inside the US. We have a burgeoning police state and when the president does something he sets the precedent and lowers the bar for other authoritarians-- especially the police.

And yes, we are seeing many, many extrajudicial killings, often associated with the use of the free retired military equipment that Obama has mandated to be given to police departments. The police put on, carry and ride their soldier gear , engage in a SWAT action and someone ends up getting killed, too often, an innocent person who happened to be at the wrong address the swat team violently attacked.

And yes, we are seeing many imprisonments. There are many places where people are being arrested on bogus or illegitimate charges, then given fines they can't afford and then put in jail-- debtors prisons that are privatedly operated. And the probation and processing is also privatized, forcing the victims of this bogus justice system to pay for their parole officers.

When a brutal fascist authoritarian law is put out there, by legislation or executive decree, the ripples it produces can be massive. The president may order the killing of two or three Americans and hundreds or thousands of others. He may authorize agencies to secretly detain a person or a few people indefinitely. But then the slippery slope leads to people being detained without the president even knowing-- for reasons of "plausible deniability." When the president can do it, every petty, two-bit judge, sherriff, town cop, magistrate and courthouse clerk starts thinking it's okay to push the limits.

And in other nations, it can be even worse. The USA, under the last 50 years of presidents have eroded the integrity and protections of the constitution. That's why the US constition, which used to be the one that was most copied by other nations, is no longer the one that's copied. Now the constitutions of Canada, South Africa and other nations are copied. What nations copy from the US now is its brutality, it's violations of basic values of justice and freedom. It is getting worse. It will continue to get worse unless we do something about it.

Sure, you can blame corporations and the legislators they buy. You can blame the mainstream media that protect the broken system. But it is the people of the USA who are putting up with this. It is the people of the US who are passively accepting the erosion of the precious rights of America. I haven't even spoken about the erosion of privacy and the erosion of decent jobs caused by globalization, automation and outsourcing. The American people are living under the false assumption that they are in control of their democracy. It doesn't work that way anymore. A lot of things don't work like they used to.











Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





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