While we were out celebrating on New Year Eve, our vacationing President quietly signed the National Defense Authorization Act.  Normally this is no cause for alarm as an NDAA Bill is a yearly Bill which authorizes general military funding.  This year was different.  This year the Bill contained a provision which gives the President of the United States the power to detain terror suspects captured anywhere in the world, even if they are U.S. citizens on US soil, and hold them indefinitely without charges or trial.  How’s that for bringing in the New Year?

Why should Pagans, Heathens, and polytheists care about this?  Isn’t it just aimed at terrorists?  That depends on the increasingly subjective term ‘terrorist suspect.’  Not convicted terrorists, suspected terrorists or suspicion of being a terror sympathizer.  Could you become a suspect for having more than seven days of food stored in your home?  Yes, you could.  Paying cash for a hotel room can also place you on a watch list.  Could simply being part of a marginalized and misunderstood minority, such as Paganism, make you a target?  Glenn Greenwald, a former civil rights attorney and current Salon columnist, had this to say about who governments typically target when they are looking to expand their power, “Typically, new powers are often applied in ways that people will feel comfortable with. So if the government wants to restrict speech they will pick the most hated person in the society and restrict their speech and nobody will care…The problem is that these things proliferate far beyond their original applications, in every instance that’s true. Historically, that’s how power functions.”

A more concrete way Pagans could come under the eye of the Department of Homeland Security is to be part of, or show sympathy for, the Occupy movement.  Although it has been local law enforcement that has cleared out Occupy camps and arrests protestors, it is the Department of Homeland Security that is directing and coordinating the actions to suppress the movement. 

… according to Rick Ellis at the Examiner, a Justice Department official says that the recent evictions of Occupy movement across the country including Salt Lake City,Denver,Portland,Oakland, and New York City were “coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.”

Author and political consultant Naomi Wolf detailed her experience being arrested during an Occupy protest in an interview with the Guardian.  The most troubling aspect of her experience, and there were many, was the Department of Homeland Security’s involvement.

Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – “frozen” they were told, “by Homeland Security”. Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.

Another activist area that some Pagans are involved with is animal rights. Recent documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the is keeping files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists.  Included in this list are persons whose crime was to illegally enter factory farms and videotape the conditions of the animals.  The terrorism they engage in is to cause economic harm to the animal owners.  Videotaping horrific conditions in a chicken factory can now redefine you as a terrorist.

But is NDAA 2012 really that bad?
The ACLU believes so.  In a Press Release sent out immediately after President Obama signed the Bill they said, “President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.  The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

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