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

Moore supporting activists who have mounted a case against the Obama administration seeking change to ‘dangerous’ NDAA law

Michael Moore, the gadfly documentarian who has made a career out of fighting against conservative issues, has called for US citizens to stand up to President Barack Obama and back a court case he says is fighting a dangerous erosion of civil liberties.

The case has been brought against a little known piece of legislation called the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) which critics say has been changed to grant Obama the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge.

A group of activists, including Daniel Ellsberg – the official who leaked the Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war – and former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges have gone to court to get the language of the NDAA changed. On Wednesday an appeals court in New York heard arguments in the case and is set to render a judgement in the coming months.

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.

WOW!

It's about time! The silence from the "left" on these issues has been deafening. I wonder how long he will hold out before he is told to sit down and shut up?

I trust Michael Moore about as far as I could throw him.

Something else is behind this . . .

Stopped clock?

Quote: Rufus T Firefly wrote in post #5

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I trust Michael Moore about as far as I could throw him.

Something else is behind this . . .

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Moore will whine and complain until he knows he is exempt, then he'll go back to being a retard.

Actually this is something that bothers liberals a lot. The law is that bad.

Thomas Coburn (R-Oklahoma)
Thomas Harken (D-Iowa)
Mike Lee (R-Utah)
Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon)
Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)
Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont)
Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)

These are the seven senators that voted against it. If your senators names aren't on here, you need to care about their neglect of your rights. They have given the King authorization over your freedom.