Earlier this week, several members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan were arrested for conspiring to kill police officers. According to prosecutors, the group planned to make a fake 911 call to lure police officers into an ambush and then use bombs to attack the funerals of the officers slain in the original ambush.

What’s even more chilling is the reasons attributed for these attacks. According to federal authorities, the militia hoped their attacks would spark others to rise up and violently oppose the government. The Hutaree militia (whose name is supposed to mean “Christian warrior”) believed that they were preparing for the Biblical end-times and the rise of the Antichrist in the form of the United States government. Therefore, they believed they were compelled by God to use violence against agents of the Antichrist and that any innocent persons harmed along the way were unfortunate collateral damage to their holy mission.

Sound at all familiar? Who needs a trip to Baghdad or Kabul when you can just head to rural Michigan?

Unfortunately, that’s not the only reason why the Hutaree story sounds familiar. It wasn’t that long ago that an anti-government believer flew a plane into a building in Texas. And it wasn’t that long before the plane attack that an anti-abortionist walked into a church and assassinated a doctor. And it wasn’t that long before the assassination that soldiers were shot by a man violently opposed to the war in Iraq. And it wasn’t that long before the shooting of the soldiers …

OK, you get my point. There’s plenty of reason for concern about the rising tide of politically-motivated violence in this country. This is particularly true if you remember back to the mid-1990s, when the militia movements first gained notoriety. A lot of what you heard back then – the government is evil, your freedoms are being taken away, the President is a traitor, good citizens should arm themselves and resist – is being echoed in the Tea Party rallies of today. Whether the current anti-government rhetoric will culminate as the rhetoric in the 1990s did – with the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the death of 168 people – remains to be seen.

But there’s a broader legal issue that has received little attention. After the September 11 attack on this country, we were told by then-President George Bush that the fight against terrorism was a new kind of war, requiring new kinds of tactics. Those tactics, as it turned out, involved indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, the use of torture, the elimination of habeas corpus, and ultimately the granting of the President with dictatorial powers in the name of “keeping us safe.”

That was a pretty easy sell to a scared nation being told about mushroom clouds hanging over its’ cities. And let’s be honest, it was also made easier when those on the wrong end of all that unchecked Presidential power were named Mohammed or Ali instead of David or Joe.

So, why haven’t we called the Hutaree militia a terrorist cell? The plan certainly fits every description of a terrorist plot I can think of. But there’s no mention of terrorism in the indictment filed against the militia members. There’s been no mention of terrorism in the President’s statements about the attack. Ironically enough, the Obama administration offered support to the people of Moscow who were victims of domestic terrorism in the subway bombings, but no references to the domestic terrorist plot broken up by law enforcement.

Why is this important? Because it exposes the lie told to us for years that constitutional rights have to be surrendered to fight terrorism. The Hutaree militia plot was foiled not by the PATRIOT act, but by good law enforcement. They’re being held in jail, not in a super-secret military prison outside of the country, and they haven’t broken out and wreaked havoc on the American countryside like we’ve been told Guantanamo detainees would if we put them in a SuperMax prison.

Apparently, that means the Republicans believe that foreign-born terrorists are way more dangerous than domestic terrorists. Isn’t that a touch unpatriotic?

I’ve said this before, and I will say it again. “Declaring war” against an abstract concept like terrorism, or crime, or littering, is fine as a metaphor but terrible as a legal rationale. If we’re serious about declaring actual war against terrorists, then we’d be renditioning the Hutaree militia members to Guantanamo and torturing them.

We’re not. Our refusal to accept actions like the Hutaree plot as terrorism is further evidence that, at some level, we understand that treating the “war on terror” as an actual war and suspending our constitutional freedoms for the duration puts us into the perpetual war that George Orwell warned us about in “1984.”

Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have introduced the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 before the United States Senate. The proposal is shocking in it’s sweep. If passed into law, the bill would literally give the President the authority to detain anyone he wishes, American citizen or not, for as long as he wants.

I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. This isn’t the opening chapter of “It Can’t Happen Here” or any other dystopic fictional work. Here’s how it would work.

According to the bill, if someone who was taken into military custody and suspected of being an “unprivileged enemy belligerent,” the bill would give the President authority to detain that person in military custody without trial or criminal charges “for the duration of hostilities against the United States.”

And you thought the Bush-era euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” for “torture” were gone. Silly you.

But what do all those euphemisms mean? Well, an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” is someone who the President determines to be a member of a group hostile to the United States. If that sounds similar to the Bush-era “enemy combatant” designation, that’s because it means the exact same thing.

How about the “duration of hostilities” thing? That means when the President declares the “war on terror” to be over. And if you think the answer to that question is “never,” just like a war on crime or poverty or bad taste in music, you’re exactly right. It’s the primary problem for treating a metaphorical war on a concept the same as a real, legal war on something tangible like a country. By telling a populace they are in a war, even a perpetual war, a government gets to enhance its’ power and repress its’ citizenry for the duration of the perpetual war. George Orwell told us that in “1984.”

Did you notice a common theme running through the description of the bill? It’s the President that gets to make all of these decisions. The bill is actually just putting into law the “Unitary Executive” theory made popular by the neoconservative movement that brought us the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay. That theory states that the President has unfettered authority during times of war as commander in chief of the military. A perpetual war, of course, means a perpetual granting to the President of unfettered authority. And that is pretty hard to distinguish from a military dictatorship.

Surely, though, such a law would be unconstitutional, right? Well, on its’ face you would think so. But the Bush administration did a pretty good job of taking this country down a constitutional rabbit hole with its’ fearmongering of 9/11, getting at least six unconstitutional ideas into the mainstream of American thought before breakfast. And with the Conservative Four on the Supreme Court, there’s no reason to be optimistic about this bill being struck down if it became law.

For example, remember Jose Padilla? He was the guy accused of trying to set off a “dirty bomb” in 2002, and held indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” by President Bush. Eventually even the Bush administration was forced to try him in Federal court, where he was sentenced in 2007 (by the way, not for anything involving a “dirty bomb”) to 17 years in prison. He remains there to this day, which is amazing to know considering how we’ve heard from the Republicans how terrorists are all supervillains whose mighty powers couldn’t possibly be held by a SuperMax prison.

I guess I understand why McCain would sponsor such legislation. He’s in a huge primary fight against a conservative talk show host, and thinks he needs to look tough to get the hard-right conservative votes. Lieberman is more of a mystery to me, and I cannot fathom how a Jewish man who knows his history could ever give the kind of authority to anyone that his bill would grant the President.

What surprises me a little is why the Tea Party kooks haven’t picked up on this. Remember, these are the folks who think that President Obama is a socialist. And a communist. And a Marxist. And a dictator. And a Klingon, I think. Regardless, they think he’s a Bad Dude who is trying to “steal our freedoms” and “take our country away” and stuff like that.

Well, guess what? If this bill passes, Obama would have the legal authority to do just that. He could declare all the Tea Partiers as “unprivileged enemy belligerents” and have them arrested and held in military detention for as long as he wants. It wouldn’t matter that the Tea Partiers have no connection whatsoever to international terrorism. The President and the President alone could make that decision, with no access to the courts or any other independent tribunal for review. After all, Padilla didn’t have anything to do with what he was accused of, but he would have been held indefinitely anyway.

Perhaps if the Tea Partiers spent less time worrying about death panels and more time worrying about military tribunals, they’d be a more productive force in society. But I’m not holding my breath.

Welcome to your new AlterNet blog. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Also, be sure to check out blogs by other readers at blogs.alternet.org

Thanks for reading,
The AlterNet Staff