Today is President’s Day, officially still known as Washington’s Birthday. It’s a day where we celebrate the contributions of America’s executive branch, apparently regardless of what they’ve done. Of course, no one cares when Washington’s Birthday actually is; it’s always observed on a Monday to ensure consumers can shop on their three-day-weekends.
The modern President’s Day is actually the result of the “Uniform Monday Holiday Act” which moved five federal holidays to the first day of the workweek. Advertisers began calling it President’s Day to help promote their week-long or sometimes month long sales, the first major sale of the new business year. Calling it “Shut Up and Buy It Day” would be more accurate.
For me, President’s Day would be completely forgettable if it didn’t also fall on another major anniversary, though one often overlooked by all the major news media. Seventy-two years ago, another President, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the arrest and detainment of over 120,000 American citizens, mostly those of Japanese descent. They were held for years without evidence or trial. It was an order that was as blatantly unconstitutional as one could imaging and it was one for which Roosevelt should have been impeached. Today, historical scholars and Americans generally hold him as one of our greatest presidents.
This is our current government, not a historical remnant from hundreds of years ago. There are still people alive today who remember being taken from their homes and placed in camps, complete with sentries and barbed wire fences. They were told it was for their own protection.
Actor George Takei was one such prisoner. Last year he described his experience with Democracy Now:
I was a five-year-old. My parents told—my father told us that we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas. It was an adventure. I thought everyone took vacations by leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers at both ends of the car, sitting on wooden benches. And whenever we approached a town, we were forced to draw the curtains, the shade. We were not supposed to be seen by the people out there. We thought that was the way things happened. We saw people crying, you know, and we thought, ‘Well, why are they crying? Daddy said we’re going on a vacation.’ We were innocent children…
At school, we began every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I could see the barb wire fence and the sentry towers right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words “with liberty and justice for all,” an innocent child unaware of the irony.
When the war ended, prisoners were given a train ticket to anywhere in the country and $20. Returning to California was difficult. Their economic situation was dire. “We lost everything,” he said. “Our first home was on skid row, with the stench of urine everywhere and those scary, smelly, ugly people lined up leaning on brick walls. They would stagger around and barf right in front of us.”
Legal challenges at the time were rejected or postponed until the war was nearly over. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Supreme Court heard a series of coram nobis cases and reversed some of their earlier decisions. The US Congress also passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which awarded $20,000 to each person afflicted.
Today, our legal situation is in far worse shape than it was in 1942. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, now often called simply NDAA, includes provisions that will allow the President and the military to detain any American citizen indefinitely and without trial if they are merely accused of aiding terrorists. The right to a fair and speedy trial is an inalienable right guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment; the right against indefinite detention is protected in the Fifth amendment, and yet what purpose do they serve now if someone can be held indefinitely with nothing but the government’s promise that they are guilty of something?
This provision of the law has already been challenged by journalists concerned with being identified as terrorists. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving the previous ruling to stand and the government’s powers intact.
Let’s restate this just so we are clear: Today you can be held forever, without even a notice to your family, merely under the suspicion you are a terrorist. The law applies everywhere that is currently deemed a “battlefield” which yes, is everywhere. So even if you never leave your house you are potentially a target. You’d have to live in another solar system to have a credible defense in the eyes of America’s court system.
Totalitarian governments are not defined by the powers they use, but rather by the powers they claim. By this logic, the United States is the most totalitarian society ever to exist. It literally claims the authority to seize, monitor, defraud, or murder anyone or anything in total secrecy and without review. Even in the Soviet Union, if a show trial actually acquitted someone of a crime, he or she was released, but not in Imperial America, where a single conviction of the throw away crime of conspiracy (and 284 acquittals) can get you a life prison sentence.
Arguments that the government will not abuse this power, or will not abuse it in large quantities are moot because they have already done so and in recent memory. But now, they have advanced authority from the nation’s second highest court and the implicit support of the Supreme Court to carry out mass internment.
But they’ll never have reason to do that, will they? Well, we are literally betting our asses they won’t.
