With the President’s signing of this act, the writ of habeas corpus — a civil right so fundamental to Anglo-American common law history that it predates the Magna Carta — is voidable upon the command of the President of the United States. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is also revocable at his will.
The Intolerable Acts was the name used by American colonists to describe a series of oppressive measures passed by the British Parliament in 1774 relating to the amount of self-government permissible in the American colonies. The acts sparked outrage and firm resistance to the tyrannical regime of King George III throughout the 13 colonies. These arbitrary violations of the rights of the colonists — rights enjoyed by all Englishmen — resulted in the convening of the First Continental Congress in order to organize a formal denouncement of the decrees and to unite the Americans in their resistance to the Crown. Despite various attempts by several delegates to reconcile with Britain, independence was declared within two years and the American War for Independence raged until liberty was achieved in 1783.
Lately, the government of the United States of America has been passing measures masquerading as laws that are easily as arbitrary and deleterious of freedom as any of the coercive measures passed by the despotic regime of the British Empire that caused our ancestors to take up arms and reassert their freedoms. The latest and perhaps most egregious of these is the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA).
President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law on New Year’s Eve 2011, granting himself absolute power to deploy the armed forces of the United States to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected (by him) of being “belligerents.”
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