From Democracy Now, an interview with journalist Chris Hedges, about the importance of federal Judge Katherine Forrest’s ruling that the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act likely violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens.

 
In the following excerpt from the transcript of the interview above, Hedges wonders who — in the face of high opposition to the NDAA both from the public and from Democrats as well as Republicans within the government — continues to push this legislation, and why:

None of the Pentagon, the FBI, as you—Mueller and everyone else, as you pointed out—none of them supported the bill, even to the extent where Mueller and others were testifying before Congress that it would make their work more difficult. And yet it passes anyway. And it is a kind of—I think it’s a kind of mystery to the rest of us as to what are the forces that—when you have the security establishment publicly opposing it, what are the forces that are putting it in place? And I can only suppose that what they’re doing is setting up a kind of legal mechanism to criminalize any kind of dissent. And Bruce can speak to this a little more. But in the course of the trial, with Alexa O’Brien, US Day of Rage, that WikiLeaks dump of five million emails of the public security firm Stratfor, we saw in those email correspondence an attempt to link US Day of Rage with al-Qaeda. Once they link you with a terrorist group, then these draconian forms of control can be used against legitimate forms of protest, and particularly the Occupy movement.