Jacobin government

http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w252.html

The original Law of Suspects was enacted by France’s revolutionary Jacobin government on September 17, 1793 (as it happened, the sixth birthday of the U.S. Constitution). The decree permitted the wholesale imprisonment of several classes of people deemed enemies of the State:

• Those considered "partisans of tyranny" or "enemies of liberty" – which in the Jacobin lexicon referred to defenders of the monarchy and traditional institutions;
• Individuals who had been denied "certificates of patriotism" issued by the revolutionary regime;
• Former nobles and erstwhile "civil servants" who had been cashiered by the National Convention;
• Those who emigrated from France between July 1, 1789 and April 8, 1792, and their family members, unless they provided suitable displays of "devotion to the Revolution."

As David A. Bell of Johns Hopkins University points out in his study The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, the Law of Suspects – the template for every modern totalitarian legal system, including the NDAA – was the enabling act for the revolutionary Reign of Terror. As is the case with a contemporary American deemed an "enemy combatant," any French citizen branded a Suspect had no right to appeal that designation. Protests of that kind were probably met with some variation of the sentiment recently expressed by Robespierre’s modern disciple, Sen. Lindsey Graham: "Shut up – you don’t get a lawyer!"

The same concept was embedded in the Soviet Union’s Fundamental Principles of Penal Legislation, which identified the central mission of the state's law enforcement apparatus (chiefly the Ckeha secret police, which would later become the KGB) as that of identifying, and removing the threat of, "socially dangerous persons." That mission was enshrined in Article 58 of the Soviet penal code, which was the foundation of that government’s perpetual war of terror against dissent – and the antecedent to section 1031 of the NDAA.

The law dealing with "socially dangerous persons," notes the authoritative Black Book of Communism, dealt with "any activity that, without directly aiming to overthrow or weaken the Soviet regime, [which] was in itself 'an attack on the political or economic achievements of the revolutionary proletariat.' The law thus not only punished intentional transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts" (emphasis added).

Additionally, the expression "socially dangerous persons" itself was based on "extremely elastic categories" that permitted the imprisonment of people in the gulag "even in the absence of guilt." This is because what the Soviet rulers were pleased to call "the law" specified that incarceration, exile, or execution could be employed as means of "social protection" against "anyone classified as a danger to society, either for a specific crime that has been committed or when, even if exonerated of a particular crime, the person is still reckoned to pose a threat to society." (Emphasis added.) The Regime in Washington has acted on similar assumptions regarding Gitmo inmates who remain in detention despite their demonstrated innocence. The NDAA would authorize similar treatment of U.S. citizens as well.

Soviet "law" discarded entirely with the idea of punishing overt acts, focusing instead on the supposed motivations of those deemed innately threatening to the regime. Note also that the Soviet system was rigged to nullify exculpatory verdicts. Soviet prosecutors, like Federal prosecutors today, considered themselves entitled to "shift the theory of criminality" as needed in order to justify detention of political offenders.