On New Year’s Eve, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. This bill states how the military is to be funded but also states various provisions on arresting and holding suspected terrorists under indefinite detention.

According to a January 2 article by E.D. Cain, The National Defense Authorization Act further supports the act of the federal government fighting the war on terrorism. This consists of putting into law the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without trial. The U.S. military now has the power to carry out anti-terrorism operations on U.S. grounds.

To better put this in perspective, this bill also contains the authorization of military personnel and law enforcement to detain U.S. citizens, also without trial. At first Obama had threatened a veto on this bill. He retreated from that threat when Congress added provisions that took the ultimate authority to detain suspects from the military’s power and gave it to the president.

The senior counterterrorism and advocate for Human Rights Watch, Andrea Prasow, expressed her disagreement with the bill before it was even signed.

“I think the president really has to veto this bill because codifying indefinite detention in the U.S., mandating military detention for all terrorism suspects found in the U.S., really sets back decades in terms of how we approach terrorism,” said Prasow.

The mass media hasn’t publicized this issue enough to give the people the opportunity to be aware of the severity of the National Defense Authorization Act. I feel that the bill was created with very vague guidelines. This gives the federal government almost complete control over U.S. citizens. In other words, this is taking away our freedom of speech, right to trial and almost all of our Bill of Rights.

We the people are unaware of the events that are happening in our government that control our rights as citizens. We must look into our leaders’ actions and obtain knowledge on our government officials to understand the importance in taking a stand. Realizing that in the end, we have the real control if we only step up to take action.