NDAA: The Biggest Election Issue No One's Talking About, OR When Cracked Gets it When Most of You Don't

9th October 2012

NDAA: The Biggest Election Issue No One's Talking About, OR When Cracked Gets it When Most of You Don't →

You don’t have to live alone in the woods, reading issues of Guns and Ammo and co-writing your manifesto with beard lice, to be terrified about the state of basic freedoms in America today. Given the counterterrorism provisions in the fairly recent National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), we currently live in a country where the government can pick up American citizens and detain them indefinitely without access to a lawyer or even a criminal trial. That means locked up forever without even the basic protections we afford to rapists and murderers.

“That can’t be right,” you say. “Such a power would be completely unconstitutional!”

And you’re right. Even President Obama said he had “serious reservations with certain provisions [of the bill] that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.” And then he signed it.

But the point is not just to beat up on the president. After all, Governor Romney did that for 90 minutes in last Wednesday’s debate without a single mention of these NDAA provisions. That’s because the NDAA will persist under a Romney administration as well. That’s right: Regardless of who wins in November, your lingering notions of living in a country that is free and democratic can best be described as “quaint” and “wrong.”

So considering that this law alters our concept of what it even means to live in a democracy, why is no one talking about it? Why does no one seem to care? There are three major reasons, but first, let’s talk about what the NDAA is…

While it’s easy to get distracted by the primary divisive policy issue of getting criminals like Big Bird off the streets, fulfilling your humanitarian duty of speaking out against—or, at the very least, being aware of—egregious [bipartisan] civil rights violations of American citizens is as much a civic duty as voting.

There are hot-button topics, there are talking points, and there are actual issues—without holding politicians accountable, these won’t overlap.

—Caitlyn