With little fanfare, in the past week the United States officially became a military dictatorship. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a suit brought against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that allowed indefinite detention of U.S. citizens.

That means the military now can, at any time, “disappear” you, even if you were born here and are a U.S. Citizen, whisk you to a secret Gulag Americana, torture you, then kill you – with your lawyer, family and friends never hearing from you again.

The suit was brought by a group led by Chris Hedges, one of the best journalists of our time. He wrote after the court action:

“The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.”

The NDAA, which was re-imposed by Congress in 2013, was a bipartisan imposition of tyranny on our once-free people. Democratic President Obama signed it into law after the NDAA was passed by the Democratic-majority Senate and the Republican-majority House. Here’s the House roll-call-of-shame.

More Democrats actually opposed the bill in the House than supported it; but enough Democrats did that it passed. Most Republicans – the supposed party of “limited government” – favored it.

In the Senate roll call, both parties overwhelmingly supported it.

Look up your senators and representatives and make sure never to back them again if they voted for this negation of all that once was good in America.

But maybe it doesn’t really matter. As we’ve learned since this Bill of Tyrannical Shame passed, the NSA spies on everybody. So I suspect there was some blackmail going on here, both in Congress and the Supreme Court, as well is in the appellate and trial courts.

The NSA holds the goods on everybody now. If someone is recalcitrant, he (or she, nowadays) can be sent a list of phone calls that were made to a mistress.

Or perhaps a justice or member of Congress whispered a racial joke during a phone call. As we’ve seen with Donald Sterling and Mel Gibson, nothing today really is private. And if a mistress can clandestinely tape a conversation and ruin a public figure, the NSA certainly can.

The problem for the NSA-NDAA police state, though, is that tyrannies are brittle. They lose touch with what’s really going on. As I pointed out in a Chronicles article a while back, even though he NSAFBICIADHSDoD, etc., can snoop on us, and to some extent collate the data electronically, it still takes actual humans to make judgments on what to analyze and categorize, and whose life to destroy.

With the U.S. regime’s unfunded liabilities – mainly Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions – now topping $200 trillion ($200,000,000,000,000.00), all these agencies will see their funding cut. They still will be able to do damage, but the damage levels will decline, and their ability to make judgments will be impaired.

Tyrannies lose track of what’s really going on. Then they fall.