MEDIA ROOTS – The U.S. corporate media avoids contextual analysis of complex issues solely to attract more viewers and obtain greater advertising revenue.  By promoting caricature and sensation, the establishment media avoids critical analysis of the political incentives which motivate modern conflict.  Translation helps overcome U.S. media’s deficiencies by allowing narratives to cross linguistic boundaries.  Dr. Nasr Ad-Din al-‘Aiadi’s chapter in the book Wars: Press Coverage in Arab Media analyzes the relationship between media and war.

Christian Sorensen for Media Roots

TRANSLATION

“War is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.” – Robert Capa, American photographic journalist

What is the distance between certainty and delusion?

The literature and discussion, which circulated during the War on Iraq, confirms a lack of information about Iraq’s internal circumstances prior to 9 March 2003.  The bulk of battlefield operations remained far from the “parasitism” of journalists and covered up what the military produced: victims, prisoners of war, destruction, and ruin.  This confirmation implicitly reveals a prevailing silent faith in professional and academic circles, and assumes media present objective, complete information about war.  Why this faith?  Because there is a preconception that media have presented complete information about wars and previous conflicts.  To disperse this delusion, we can ask: What did we witness about the Falkland Island War (the Maldives War), which broke out between the British and Argentinians in 1982?  And what did we witness about the Iran-Iraq War, nicknamed “The Bus War,” which lasted eight years?  It earned this name because the Iraqi Army was organizing bus trips for journalists to see Iranian prisoners of war.  In turn, the Iranian military was transporting journalists in busses to view Iraqi prisoners of war.  Everyone knows that journalists were not permitted to move to the battlefield, which would have conveyed the destructive war’s reality and would have shown war’s multi-dimensional tragedies.

What did we see of the following wars: the Second Gulf War and the War on Afghanistan, the events of which are still alive in individual and collective memory, in front of insistence by the American Armed Forces and Taliban to prohibit media field work?  The Americans and the Taliban pushed the media to capture stereotypical images or clichés in order to signify the presence of war: images of planes taking off from battleships; planes hovering in the sky amid clouds of smoke; anti-aircraft missiles piercing the darkness; a man in Afghan garb smiling and shaving in front of the camera crews; and the corpse of a civilian slipping by the camera’s lens, lying on the sidewalk, without us knowing who was behind his death.

Indeed these images, to which one can add the “concentrations” of Afghan refugees along the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iranian-Afghanistan borders, do not convey the war led by the five wealthiest countries of the world against the poorest countries of the world.  Rather, such visuals reproduced stereotypical imagery far from the furnace of war, which convert the scenes into a simplified visual record, and leave one to dig into prejudices without raising any questions.  In short, war coverage in Afghanistan was like trying to describe a black cat in a dark room, as the Vice President of Fox News Channel put it.

As a matter of accuracy, one can say there are indeed very few examples of media succeeding in highlighting war’s ugly face.  Among them: the early days of the launch of the War against Afghanistan and the latter years of the War against Vietnam.

Maybe some believe that confirmation of a lack of information about the War on Iraq translates practically into the following judgment.  Much has changed recently in the media world.  There has been a rise in the number of media outlets, an increase in furious competition among them, and development in their technological arsenals, especially the speed with which they transmit linked, digital information directly to studios and newsrooms.  There has been a rise in the pace of this flow, along with the potential to monitor events in a more professional manner.  Despite all, humanity still suffers from a scarcity of information and news regarding the war.  Indeed, technology cannot eliminate the distance between certainty and delusion.  War contributed to overthrowing this illusory visualization, which links advanced technology, the right to complete information, and freedom of expression and the press.  Perhaps this fact propelled some researchers to confirm “the demise” of the fourth power.  

A French cameraman, Jean Claude Cousteau once said:

War had been perceived through a set of familiar images: artillery shelling and air bombardment; anti-aircraft armed response; the movement of military units; ambulances racing onto the battlefield, transporting the wounded and injured; explosions; body parts strewn amid the rubble of a car bomb.  We can convey war in more depth and greater detail in the photographic image.  For example, consider highlighting a woman who is skinnier than her shadow, wrapped in sorrow, in a residential, grey neighborhood in the former Yugoslavia.  She lays out her laundry, limited to military uniforms.  This image might enrich the view of war.  We might likewise tell about the war in Bosnia through the image of a Bosnian grandfather displaced from his town.  He left aboard an old Fiat, carrying his humble belongings.  An old picture of his father wearing a Tarbush stands out among the man’s belongings.

However, in light of a view of war and armed conflicts still under “formation,” we believe the media condense some images, which turned into religious icons through their frequent repetition.  These images became evidence to comprehend the conflict on the one hand and to justify it on the other hand.  For example, many camera crews were physically standing amid the Israelis to capture images of the sons of the First Palestinian Intifada, but they were largely exempting the Israeli soldiers from their images!  Within this shortcut, we find that the Palestinian martyr is translated, in visual media in a solemn procession of large crowds, which raise his coffin wrapped in the Palestinian flag, to his final resting place, amid wails and gunfire, and slogans of various Palestinian organizations.  In contrast, a dead Israeli is symbolized by the remainder of a bus, by ambulances and tanks circling Palestinian villages and towns, by Apache helicopters pouring its wrath upon populated district in which “one who is wanted” by Israeli soldiers lives.  Indeed, the first images produce grief, sorrow, and perhaps compassion and empathy.  The second images don’t include the violent military response only, but justify it.

Can one develop a way of dealing with media without varying its content?

The U.S. Armed Forces created a new relationship with the press and various media known as “embedding,” whereby the Americans recruit “press representatives and attach them to military units” on the battlefield.  For the first time in media’s history, roughly 600 press representatives joined the allies’ forces.  Some professional organizations have indeed criticized this practice, expressing their fears that it is a serious violation of the journalist occupation, since the “recruited” press representative commits in writing to respecting 50 articles of a document that defines their “new” life.  This whole process revolves around a lack of penetrating “military secrets,” like that of any soldier!  Articles 41, 42, and 43 of the same document stipulate the prevention of airing images of military units without approval of the American military authorities!  Perhaps the concerned authorities realize verbal communication possesses the flexibility, word play, and metaphors, which allow one to communicate better than imagery alone.

Some reporters who lived through this experience have tried to dispel these fears by affirming that what they’ve gone through is considered a positive step in news coverage on the conditions of war.  In previous wars, reporters were far from the battlefield and were only permitted to transmit what commanders clarified in press conferences, which were held regularly and which nearly turned the media into a loudspeaker for the military.  This war is different, as one of the French press “recruits” confirms: “I descended into the battlefield and witnessed what happened on the level of individual military units with whom I travelled.  I was content to write what I saw,” wrote one embedded French journalist.  Mr. Claude Bruillot, a broadcast journalist from France 24, affirms his side of the story: “While what I reported about war, originating from the American military unit to which I was attached, was partial and incomplete, it was still factual and real.”

If some war correspondents were considering their experiences with Coalition military units as embodying a development in their profession during wartime, then for the following reasons they had a hard time convincing the media masses of this “qualitative step,” which the media made in covering the aforementioned war: Armies don’t usually agree to publish images, except for those which highlight their victories.  History is always written by the victors.  If they do not, then they need to, maybe even forcefully, go against all who try to write it without their consent.

The formula for dealing with reporters has changed its shape.  But has its meaning changed in light of the absence of multiple sources and the absence of possibly using non-military news sources?  Certain circumstances justify asking that question.  Among them, the difficulty reporters face in moving around alone on the battlefield, the lack of space within which to work, and the fact that they’re unable to investigate what is presented to them as “official” information.

In war correspondents’ media discipline, freedom to act independently always remains in newsroom officials’ hands, far from battlefield realities.  Freedom to act independently takes on new meaning in the dictionary when dealing with the media: abolishing publishing and broadcasting; delaying or cutting off one’s broadcast to lose the real-time feed, and consequently its importance; rewording or summarizing the events, et cetera.

What do media do to war? Or what does war do to media?

We believe that the sharp debate over the relationship between media and war is still a prisoner of the ancient dilemma and represented in the question: What do media do to war?

This consuming dilemma loaded the debate, drawing attention to media’s coverage of war.  It revealed the dimension of propaganda and misinformation in war reporting, through covering up war’s tragic reality and through recording the allegedly neutral linguistic vocabulary of modern war.  For example, “clean war,” “surgical war,” “smart rockets,” “neutralizing the enemy force,” and other such vocabulary switch, in the long run, from explaining the misinformation to justifying it on one hand.  And on the other hand this vocabulary overlooks details known to the media establishment, like recent developments, the forms of their interaction, and comportment with the reality of wars and armed conflicts.  Many justifications are used to confer legitimacy upon media’s “deficiencies” in armed conflicts.  We recall two justifications, which begin from different starting points, but integrate well as the arguments progress:

The First Justification: Some believe that the media blackout in wars and armed conflicts is almost necessary and incontrovertible, because “armies are intent on secret planning and military operations, and are intent on not restraining the soldiers’ determination.”  One can infer from this statement that armies do not possess a deliberate intention to deny the public of their media rights, but rather are just striving to adhere to their legal right to protect military secrets!  Those who believe in the validity of this view argue that armies are changing their methods of dealing with journalists during armed conflicts.  So the armies no longer prevent journalists from reporting on war events, and no longer deal with the media by cutting their communications and content haphazardly, but rather become a frame within which media must work.  In this regard, Director of Press Service for Media Delegation and American Military Communication, Colonel Tangy, says:

“We came to establish press centers regularly on the battlefield.  The goal of setting up these centers is to put information and news at journalists’ disposal in all neutrality.  We began from a principle, which insists that whoever speaks in the name of the army should always tell the truth, but this doesn’t mean that he should speak the whole truth.”  

The Second Justification: The French researcher Armand Mattelard (1992) believes media’s forceful persuasion and its capability to “create” and erase events emerged at a very early time in the history of mass communication, and that war has only reinforced media’s persuasion.  These events resulted in giving legitimacy to media censorship.  This is the same legitimacy which competent authorities use to justify the measures they adopt in order to limit media activity in any armed conflict.  This all started from previous events in which public opinion impacted the course of military operations.

Consequently, one understands from the previous two components that war granted armies legitimacy to “control” the media.  Armies used this legitimacy to highlight an event, to conceal it, or to draw attention away from it.  Consider the U.S. invasion of Panama during a time when events in Romania led to the death of Ceausescu, the Romanian head of state.  Despite the fact that the number of casualties from the invasion of Panama was double the number of casualties from events in Romania, nobody talked about the heinous massacres that the U.S. military perpetrated in Panama.  The reason is clear.  The United States of America had imposed an airtight media blackout of this invasion.  In comparison, media exaggerated what happened in Romania in an immoral and unprofessional manner.  Media exaggerated events in Romania for the sake of hiding the massacres that the U.S. military committed in Panama.

The extent of this control in the media doesn’t stop at “filtering news and information,” but extends to the control media have over war’s image in the audience’s imagination, whether by altering the grounds which the concept of war covers, or by concealing its real goals and presenting them as if they are necessary to attain some humanitarian ideal.

This is the framework within which wars and armed conflicts were diagnosed.  In other words, wars and armed conflicts were linked to certain people, like political leaders and heads of state.  Indeed, this diagnosis explains wars and armed conflicts through factors far from the economy, society, or politics, where war is linked to certain individuals’ behavior and to subjective and personal inclinations.  In this context, it approaches chapters of war and armed conflicts as if they were Westerns, in which a good cowboy fights an evil cowboy.  Or media give a simple, naive explanation for wars, like saying that World War II broke out due to Adolf Hitler’s coarse disposition and mood swings!

Military experts, who comment on events and entice studio correspondents, also enter involuntarily within the aforementioned endeavor.  Television channels now have an honorable and defiant desire to use all possible means to transmit the facts of war and explain the military strategy used.

Due to repeated scenes and an absence of images and information about war’s on-goings, this presence slid into what resembles an athletic sports match: players are on the field, while coaches and specialists comment on the contest from the studio.  And so, on a symbolic plane, war transformed into a spectacle absorbing humane and permanent elements in order to open the field to dramatic content and commentary of the conflict.  The aforementioned concepts and methods used were incapable of changing the image of war, armed conflicts, and its goals pertaining to collective consciousness.  

We believe that now is the time to approach the relationship between war and the media from other angles.  Among them: What do wars do to media?  This dilemma, if filled with scrutiny and precision, can withdraw the aforementioned debate from a domain of justification and place it on the platform of critical review in order to analyze what media does during wars and armed conflicts.  This will occur in order to upgrade the media profession, despite difficult circumstances which might ultimately take the journalists’ very lives.  This will also occur for a new debate to explode around media’s relationship to reality, around media’s moral and literary responsibility, and about standards to evaluate media’s credibility.

Who said media is satisfied with simply transmitting news during war?

The lack of information about the War on Iraq is reflected in a belief, which is considered genuine to some and naive to others.  This belief indicates that media’s job remains the same regardless of the context within which it is active.  In other words, the functions that direct media’s activities stay the same whether in circumstances of war or in a peaceful context.  Indeed, trying to escape from the burden of this belief should not be understood as a blessing to what media does, but should be understood as describing earlier experiences.  Has it not been said in the past that propaganda is the legitimate daughter of wars?  Historians confirm World War I created propaganda, and specified propaganda’s initial definition as follows: the overall activities and work that a government undertakes to influence the citizenry and public opinion.  This concept had developed in World War II to become synonymous with psychological warfare, which includes disinformation, rumors, spreading false reports, and misinformation.  Wars have changed media’s roles, since wars pushed media to incline towards propaganda more than information.  Can it be said that media, which belong to states involved in war or are a party to these states, had strove to stand up against this inclination and succeeded?

The examples that proved this success were regrettably very few.  The famous satirical French newspaper Le Canard Enchaine came into being for rejecting war propaganda and government censorship of the press.  Wars had supplied the public with a fundamental lesson: many media outlets toe the line between information and propaganda, a line which could be destroyed if the horrors of war intensified.

Then, one should ponder the most useful and most feasible ways to take a stand against media’s transformation into an obedient instrument of psychological warfare during armed conflicts, as evidenced by its submissiveness to the justifications, which we touched upon in asking “what do media do to war?”  We believe diversifying news sources and preferring neutral ones is the first way to take a stand.  And if neutral sources cannot be reached, then the source from which news is derived must be confirmed.  This assurance addresses the audience clearly and implicitly, and directs their attention to the necessity of dealing with this news cautiously or to put its content in parenthesis.

Offering parameters within which news and images should function is the second way to take a stand against media’s transformation.  Many armed conflicts have demonstrated that numerous television images, which pour forth abundantly, do not specify the time, place, or context within which the images were produced.  Television screens overflow with these images, manipulating the viewers’ emotions without teaching them anything.  Images fit for consumption without an expiration date; these scenes paint war as the military wants it to be and not as it occurs in reality.  So images, contrary to what some believe, are not credible documentation of events as they occur, but are rather less accurate in transmitting or expressing reality.  This is because images are tied to a framework, which introduces some elements into the visual field and excludes other elements.  It is sufficient that we alter the framework, which includes the image itself, until we change the meaning and exchange it with the “truth.”

Note:  For all original citations and formatting, please consult the original text.

Translation by Christian Sorensen for Media Roots

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Photo by Flickr User Truthout.org

MEDIA ROOTS – The criminal trial for my alleged resisting arrest was again delayed this morning after prosecutors demanded access to a video that captured the aftermath of the March 25 detainment when I defied an unlawful order by a US Park Police offcier to put away my video camera. The trial showed increased public interest with several additional pedicab operators in attendance in court this morning for the outcome of the trial will heavily influence the future of this green mode of transport on the National Mall.

Citizen journalists, while lawfully protected by the Constitution, continue to be harassed – and occasionally detained – by many officers of the law for recording them during their duties. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the studios of Russia Today yesterday to discuss how citizen journalists’ rights continue to be marginalized yet how affective their work is at holding law enforcement accountable.

Oskar Mosco

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Liz Wahl and Oskar Mosco discuss the plight of citizen journalists.

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MEDIA ROOTS — Independent journalists have a passion to get information out to individuals who might not otherwise receive it and most often require supplementary sources of income to survive.  Here at Media Roots, life’s no different.

My second line of work is operating a pedicab, a three-wheeler that helps shuttle tourists to various monuments, memorials, and museums in the nation’s capital.  Pedicabs have been in operation here for over five years and boast a perfect safety record and a near-perfect customer satisfaction record.  And while 38 police departments now claim jurisdiction within the District, only the U.S. Park Police find issue with the hard-working and generally light-hearted independents operating on the National Mall.

Most pedicabbers have other lines of work, like indy journalists, and are typically rather articulate and rational.  The majority have never had previous issue with the law and are not looking to create any unnecessary trouble for law enforcement.  But after only a few hours at the third-most popular tourist attraction in the United States, anyone can witness how the aggressors wear an official costume, while the pacifists cruise around accepting gratuities.

While peddling on Sunday, March 25, I found myself pulling up to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum at approximately 3:00 pm.  Another pedicab appeared to have been abandoned in front of the museum.  And nearby was a Park Police cruiser.  In order to prevent the missing operator from having to pay the $195 to recover the cab from the impound lot, I briefly attempted to cart the empty cab back to our shop downtown.

Almost immediately, Officer Blake of the U.S. Park Police, the same officer whom had issued me a previous citation just weeks before (only to be dismissed by DC adjudication services), appeared and ordered me to not take the human-powered vehicle.  I immediately complied and moved approximately 20 feet from the scene.  Blake would follow me and continued to instruct me I couldn’t stop where I had – in front of a parked tour bus.

“Where would you like me to go?” I asked.

“Off the Mall,” he would reply with an unlawful attempt to exile me from over 300 acres of public property.

Unsure how to respond, I steered my pedicab to what appeared to be a legal parking spot a motor vehicle had just vacated.  Again, the officer was hot on my trail.

“Give me your ID. You’re getting a ticket.”  I complied with no hesitation.  In order to maintain a level of accountability, I also pulled out my video camera to capture the scene.

“Put your camera away,” he continued.

“I don’t have to put my camera away.”  After all, I am the organizer for DC CopBlock and quite familiar with the First Amendment.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

I had officially been placed under arrest, despite the fact that two other pedicabbers were seemingly ignored by officer Blake.  I was in utter disbelief that not only was I getting arrested again (the first arrest in November, also a charge for resisting arrest, was eventually dismissed by federal prosecutors), but I was now getting arrested for a Constitutionally-protected act.

As the handcuffs were aggressively placed on my already-sore wrists, I became dizzy and uncertain about the officers’ intentions.  They screamed orders at me, even though I was not talking back nor were there any loud noises nearby.  A tourist and his son a few feet away were visibly traumatized by the incident with the younger crying and his father yelling at the police for their blatant display of excessive force.

“Stop resisting,” Officer Hiatt continued to yell at me, even though he was close enough to kiss me.

“I’m not resisting,” I calmly replied, uncertain what else to say.

The officer then slammed me down to the gravel.  Because I was already cuffed, I couldn’t break my fall and ended up landing face-first.  The fall knocked me out for a minute and the trauma to my shoulder is still present to this day.  But the emotional damage of a tyrannical police force, operating without regard to the law or morality might take years to recover from.

Oskar Mosco is a regular contributor for Media Roots

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TBD — Two Park Police officers bend down to look at another groaning black-haired pedicab operator, his face against the grass and lying on his stomach on the National Mall. They talk into their radio. On the street is a little green pedicab, abandoned. One officer fastens handcuffs on the young man, a manager at National Pedicabs.

This pedicab operator calls himself Oskar Mosco and is the same one who was arrested last fall and formed the D.C. Pedicab Operators’ Association to advocate for operators amid the evolving regulations and allegations of harassment that have come up in the last year.  He was last arrested in November, but the case was dismissed earlier this year.  The National Park Service controls the pedicab territory of the National Mall, and Park Police enforce the rules.  Yet the NPS is still developing its formal pedicab regulations, which will apparently mirror those the District Department of Transportation released last year.  The Park Police note that D.C. traffic regulations apply, however, and regularly write tickets to the region’s pedicabbers.

Mosco attempts to ask what orders he disobeyed.

“We are no longer discussing this,” the Park Police officer tells him. “You are under arrest.”

The two officers pull Mosco to his feet and escort him to a police car, in which a second pedicab operator sits, as Mosco shouts that he was arrested for videotaping the police. “You should not get arrested for videotaping a police officer!” Mosco yelled to onlookers in front of the Natural History Museum. “This is a free country, not a police state!”

Pedicabs are a human-powered transportation option that fill a unique demand in an increasingly petroleum-dependent society. They have proven to be safe and fun in areas that demand a variety of transportation options. The very survival of America’s emerging pedicab industry depend on a population that is informed, and concerned, with the what else can be possible. Those interested in following the development of American pedicab culture can follow the page Everything Pedicab.

Read more about Two D.C. pedicab operators were arrested on the National Mall.

© 2012 TBD

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Photo provided by Daniel Blackwell. 

MEDIA ROOTS — Pat Buchanan and Judge Napolitano were fired recently from their respective networks for what is thought to be their outspoken dissent from the U.S.-Israeli lobby.  But whilst the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Estimate, and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta all agree that there is no evidence that Iran has, nor is making, nuclear weaponry, Obama continues to enforce questionable sanctions and command a military that is escalating the threat of war.

The fact that Western media aren’t raising questions about the dangerous risks of Russian and Chinese opposition to U.S. foreign policy, specifically with regard to Syria and Iran, shows the gaping lack of independent mass media in the U.S. reaching enough minds to countervail corporate/establishment propaganda.  This perpetual deception is evident even when lies are corrected for past crimes enabled by the perpetual government efforts of deceiving the public.

In D.C., they say, perception is reality.  According to Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the current U.S. government may now be the most corrupt in human history.  It doesn’t represent its citizenry nor pre-supposed values of truth, justice, mercy, and so forth.  It does represent, however, the few special interests of the ruling-class.

Oskar Mosquito

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INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY — President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. According to news reports, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta told members of the House of Representatives on February 16 that “Tehran has not made a decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.” However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.

At the moment the American “Ministry of Truth” is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria.  Recently, there were some explosions in faraway Thailand, and the explosions were blamed on Iran.  Last October, the FBI announced that the bureau had uncovered an Iranian plot to pay a used car salesman to hire a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US.  The White House idiot professed to believe the unbelievable plot and declared that he had “strong evidence,” but no evidence was ever released.  The purpose for announcing the non-existent plot was to justify Obama’s sanctions, which amount to an embargo—an act of war—against Iran for developing nuclear energy.

As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy.  IAEA inspectors are permanently in Iran and report no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.

Read more about Silencing the Critics (published last week by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts).

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Photo by Flickr user AZRainman

MEDIA ROOTS — The U.S. blindly took another giant step further into tyranny last week—no, really.

In most corporate and, even, many independent news outlets, the public was kept up-to-date with the deaths of singer Davy Jones and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.  However, relatively little attention was given to the annihilation of Constitutionally-protected civil liberties executed by the National Defense Authorization Act, which went into effect  Wednesday, March 1.  On the very same day two celebrities coincidentally died from unexpected heart-attacks in the U.S., a bipartisan Congress carefully dealt orchestrated attacks against the First Amendment.

Instead of the anti-democratic new law merely taking effect, the House resolved to further the scope of the NDAA by preventing assembly near public officials guarded by the Secret Service.  Not only is the U.S. tradition of protesting at the White House under siege—now those vying to replace the presidency are also exempt from the ‘nuisance’ of protesters.  499 Congressional Representatives voted in favor of HR 347—the Federal Restriction Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act—only three voted against: Paul Broun (R-GA), Justin Amash (R-MI), and Ron Paul (R-TX).

The President signed the NDAA into law on New Year’s Eve, but hardly did a media firestorm result from the fact that the military is now legally able to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens solely based on suspicion.  That’s right.  Despite Presidential Policy Directive 14, future protesters at the White House could be locked up indefinitely, without due process of the law.  Of course, Attorney General Eric Holder has begun engaging in Orwellian semantical double-speak regarding due process in cases of arbitrary targeted killings when he spoke before law school students today at Chicago’s Northwestern University:

“Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.  The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

It’s a terrible precedent Holder is working to set with regard to due process, which may easily spread to the First Amendment and other rights once the Fifth Amendment is undermined.  Although, no one may be “deprived of life” without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment, Holder claims that due process “doesn’t necessarily come from a court.”

Author Naomi Wolf reminded the world the day before NDAA Day 1 that U.S. citizens are “sleepwalking into becoming a police state.”  She explained further:

“Overstated?  Let’s be clear: the NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial.  The president’s own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power.  As I have been warning since 2006: there is not a country on the planet that you can name that has ever set in place a system of torture, and of detention without trial, for an “other”, supposedly external threat that did not end up using it pretty quickly on its own citizens.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is now calling on all U.S. citizens to pressure the Senate to clean up the NDAA.  People must specifically demand that no president ever be given the power to use the military far from armed conflict to imprison civilians indefinitely, especially within U.S. borders.  Additionally, no President should be required to put civilians into military custody without charge.  Chris Anders from the ACLU explains:

“The United States itself should be off-limits for the military to impose indefinite detention without charge or trial.  It would be unconstitutional for the president to apply the NDAA provisions here at home, but the Senate rejected explicit protections to reinforce the Constitution’s and the Posse Comitatus Act’s protections.”

But without much leverage other than the power of the vote, which most voters perpetually award to the same politicians they protest, U.S. civilian demands are easily dismissed, as the Democrat and Republican parties know they have monopolized the political process.  Perhaps, it’s time to boycott both corporate political parties responsible for so much oppression.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is suing the President for signing the NDAA.  He, along with several other plaintiffs, such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, blame both political parties for the passing of this totalitarian law.  They suspect that the corporate state ensured its passage because of potentially imminent uprisings in the United States.  In Hedges’ own words:

“This demented ‘war on terror’ is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state.  The NDAA expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe.  It erases fundamental constitutional liberties.  It means we can no longer use the word ‘democracy’ to describe our political system.”

Chris Hedges on Alex Jones’ Infowars discusses the lawsuit.

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Oskar Mosquito is a regular contributor to Media Roots.

Photo provided by Flickr user DVIDSHUB.

***UPDATE

Obama recently came out to issue new guidelines for the NDAA provision, but the move is simply a PR stunt.  It does not strip his absolute power of indefinitely detaining U.S. citizens.

Abby