By Ralph Lopez

opednews.com

I recently engaged in a friendly but rather unsettling conversation with a man from Algeria who became visibly upset when I told him about NDAA, the new law allowing indefinite military detention of US citizens without charge or trial. He said he had come here to get away from that sort of thing, which had happened in his country and was fresh in his mind. His description of what happened in Algeria during its equivalent of Argentina's "Dirty War" was chilling and he kept shaking his head about the new law here, visibly distressed.

Basically what he said was that the next step is a large number of people, it was 50,000 in his country he said, will disappear without a trace. The government will do it to instill fear in everyone else and to show they can do it, and get away with it, so everyone else is much easier to manage. It will not matter whether you are rich or poor, on the left or on the right, a university professor, a doctor, or if your father is a rich businessman. It simply won't matter. Your family will go to the police station to file a missing persons report but they will not be able to help you. Left or right doesn't matter, it is anyone with strong opinions who can express them who are the threat.

Everywhere you turn there will be a brick wall. No one knows anything, yes it has been happening a lot, and no one can help. It will be as if you had never existed.

I asked him if there was some kind of historic national reconciliation and prosecution of the criminals who did it. He said no one would know whom to prosecute, in the end, because even this much later no one knew who was really behind it. Of course it was the Army, but not the entire Army, just certain specialized units, perhaps segregated from the rest, led by generals whom other generals did not challenge, perhaps out of fear that they could go to. What the military excels at is compartmentalizing functions and telling groups of people only what they need to know, and keeping the rest almost as in the dark as civilians.

In every respect it sounded like some sort of ultimate gang takeover.

I'm not kidding when I say he was upset. He was squirming and shaking his head. He spoke with a thick French accent and said he was going to Google this, since of course there has been a major media blackout. He said this is how it starts, the declared figleaf of legal authority to detain anyone. He acted as if he knew what comes next. His age was hard to tell, but he was obviously educated, and he spoke well despite the thick French accent. I have no opinion on whether he might be right or wrong, or if what he was saying is valid. I am relating a story about someone whom I can describe as genuine, intelligent, and sincere.

Even more distressing, if that is possible, is the concerted campaign by minions of the traitors to the Constitution to assert that the new law does not apply to American citizens despite the detailed and concise warnings of opponents in the House and the Senate that the law does, and which Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) called "carefully crafted to mislead the public."

Rep. Tom McClinton (R-CA) on the House floor said:

I rise in opposition to Section 1021 of the underlying Conference Report (H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act). This section specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with "substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any "associated forces'" -- whatever that means.

Would "substantial support" of an "associated force," mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda? We don't know.

McClintock then said:

We're told not to worry -- that the bill explicitly states that nothing in it shall alter existing law.

Then McClintock notes that "existing law" is "only an assertion by the last two presidents that this power is inherent in an open-ended and ill-defined war on terrorism."

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