Michael Moore asks citizens to stand up to Obama’s ‘dangerous’ erosion of civil liberties | The Raw Story

Michael Moore asks citizens to stand up to Obama’s ‘dangerous’ erosion of civil liberties | The Raw Story:

'via Blog this'Now Moore has come out swinging against the NDAA too, saying that the Obama White House is embarked on a plan to scrap vital civil rights that should concern every American citizen despite a relative lack of publicity about the case. “At the moment a lot of people think the NDAA does not look scary. But this sort of thing never looks scary at the start. But the American people will rue the day if they do not stop this,” he told The Guardian in an interview.

Moore was speaking after a court in New York heard an appeal in the case against the NDAA. Lawyers seeking to overturn the NDAA argued that it erodes American rights and free speech and grants huge and unconstitutional powers to the government to suppress dissent and indefinitely detain people without going through proper legal channels. Lawyers for the Obama administration insists that the NDAA represents nothing new and has never been used in the ways that its critics suggest.

Moore said he would be seeking to explain the case to his fans. “If the American people understood this, I do believe they would be very, very concerned about it,” he said. The force behind such hard-hitting documentaries as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine – which took on rightwing issues like President George W. Bush’s security policy and gun laws – said that liberals were giving Obama a free pass due to his popularity with Democrats. “(Obama) puts this face on it that makes it difficult. It was much easier when the face was Bush,” Moore said “We have to work and speak out against the Obama administration and everything they are doing to destroy civil liberties.”

Such strong language from a liberal icon is likely to shock many of Moore’s usual audience. But the case brought against the NDAA is rapidly becoming a rallying cry for many civil liberties advocates who see Obama as pursuing much of the same national security policy as his predecessor Bush. “The major assault by the Bush administration has been embraced by the Obama administration,” said Hedges.

The NDAA case hinges on language that critics say is too vague. It grants the power of detention and the right to use force against anyone deemed to have “substantially supported” Al Qaida or the Taliban or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners”. Critics say those terms are so broad that it, for example, include journalists or academics who interview Islamic militants or clerics. Or that the definition of terrorism might extend to those involved in projects like Wikileaks or cyber-hacking groups like Anonymous or the Occupy protests.